


crawling out of the underworld

by The_Wavesinger



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: (or. well. platonic telepathy bond thingy at least?), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Gen, Handwave Logic, Platonic Soulbond, Soul Stone (Marvel)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-08-19 12:30:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20209780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Wavesinger/pseuds/The_Wavesinger
Summary: Natasha wakes up in the Soul Stone. It's a beginning, of sorts.





	crawling out of the underworld

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mitsein](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mitsein/gifts).

> The title is (slightly modified) from I'm Alive by The Hives, which is also the song prompt that inspired this story.

Emptiness.

Pure, blinding emptiness.

She feels like she’s floating and drowning all at once, surrounded by (on top of) a lake of some silvery liquid that crawls through her nose and mouth and presses into her eyeballs and creeps up against her skin in an oppressive caress. Her thoughts are a buzz of static, nothing and everything and all the in-betweens, lines of nonsense and things she might have known flashing through her head. She can’t move her body; she doesn’t even know if she _has_ a body.

She drifts.

—

A tap-tap-tap.

Natasha’s eyes fly open.

The first thing she thinks is: _I have eyes again._

Then, _I can think._

Everything around her is blood-red. The sky stretches out red until it meets the horizon. The ground she’s standing on (smooth, marble from the feel of it, and she realizes with a start that she’s wearing shoes and shouldn’t be able to tell that), the pillars holding up the roof of the open structure (vaguely Ancient Greek-like, but architecture’s never been her strong suite) she’s standing in. She feels like she’s stepped into one of her blood-soaked nightmares.

The world around her shaking lends credence to that fact.

It’s as if she’s seeing everything around her through a fine sheet of glass, or maybe as if she’s underwater. It’s—not a pleasant feeling, as if she’s blinking away and back into existence. Or if the world around her is, spinning and whirling in a dizzying cacophony of colors and shapes.

It’s flashes of red and red and red again, spinning around and around until Natasha’s doubling over with her hands on her knees, gasping at the wavering shades of red and—green?

Slowly, she forces herself to straighten out. She feels like there’s a razor-thin tightrope under her feet, and she’s just barely holding herself upright and not falling through, but she can see a figure now, maybe six feet away from her. A woman, green-skinned and with more damnable red hair. A figure that’s almost familiar, or at least sets something niggling at the back of her mind.

The figure is walking away.

“Hey,” Natasha calls, and is surprised to find that her voice comes out clear and loud. “Hey!”

But the figure doesn’t hear her. Or, at least, it—she—doesn’t listen. She keeps walking away, and Natasha thinks, _no_.

Taking a deep breath, she goes after her.

The building is solid ground, at least, even if it’s flickering in and out of whatever kind of existence this is. When she descends the steps the ground is liquid, but buoyant, so that every step she takes is airy and feather-light, as if she’s stepping on nothing.

It feels like she’s flying and it feels like she’s sinking and she can’t decide which of the two is the truth.

—

The blood red slowly fades away, Natasha realizes, even if the world around her is still blurring itself in a maddening way. The color scheme is apparently one of those things that _can_ change, because it’s now shades of yellow. Grasses and brushes spring up in the path of the walking figure, and eventually they turn into trees. Solid, giant things eventually, with broad trunks and sweeping branches, lining a broad pathway leading—somewhere.

She’s still walking on water; she can’t feel whatever soil the trees have sunk their roots into. The woman is growing smaller and smaller in the distance, and when Natasha rounds a sudden bend in the path (and that’s what the thing she’s walking through has become, now, a proper path, except that everything’s an amber yellow-ish color she’s never actually seen in the real world) she’s gone.

“_Fuck_,” Natasha breathes.

She could sit down now, she thinks. The world around her has become more stable, less shaky. The trees look inviting. Some of them have little hollows in them where she could curl up. It’s not even that she’s tired, but—

No.

She’s going to walk on.

—

The path goes on forever.

Or at least, that’s what it feels like.

Trees blend into more trees and the monotony isn’t even broken up by changing colors. She walks on and on and on.

She’s lost, of course, but then being in whatever place she’s in is being lost by very definition. Beyond that, she doubts it matters very much whether she could find her way back to the red pavilion. In whatever strange place this is, landmarks and normal distances and time don’t exactly seem to matter.

_The Stone,_ Natasha thinks, at one point. _Either this is the afterlife, or the Soul Stone._ She really hopes it’s the Soul Stone, because she’s no Eurydice, and Orpheus isn’t going to come looking for her. She has Steve and Clint and the Avengers, but they’re all like her. They’ll go on and fight Thanos and not look back, and she wouldn’t want it any other way, but it also means she’s stuck here until she dies. (Or for all eternity, but that’s not a good thought.)

At least maybe the whole life-for-a-life thing means that Clint’s actually taken the Stone and the Avengers have destroyed Thanos. Because otherwise, well, she knows what complete, utter defeat tastes like. It’s something she’d never like to experience again.

—

The trees begin to thin again.

Natasha almost wouldn’t have noticed, but the trees also begin to take on a different tinge, until by the time they’ve receded into shrubs they’re almost all green. Not bright green, like some gaudy human-made thing, but the jades and the deep, verdant greens of foliage that maybe should have belonged to the trees she’s now left far behind her as she walks through a flat, empty plane instead.

Or at least it’s a flat, empty plain until she comes abruptly to a shimmering silver lake, waves lapping at the still-green shore.

She could circle around it, maybe. If—

But no. The world is shivering again, as if it’s trying to keep itself warm during a blizzard raining hell down on it, and then, blinking into existence is the fuzzy form of the woman Natasha had seen earlier.

“Hey,” Natasha calls out. She tries to keep her voice even, but. She doesn’t know if she succeeds, because there’s another person here, and she’s not alone, and she feels almost like she could cry.

The woman turns towards her. Her eyes widen with surprise. Then, “How are you here?”

“Um.” If _she’s_ here, she must know, mustn’t she. “Well, on Vormir—” _You don’t know who she is_, Natasha thinks. But she stands in this strange world as if she knows it. She can’t be wholly evil if she’s the one down here and not whoever accompanied her to acquire the Stone. (Or she could have made a willing choice, but Natasha isn’t going to think about those kinds of choices, not now.)

“You’re from another time.” The woman says it like a statement, like she _knows_. And maybe it’s something Natasha should have known, with the things the Stone’s guardian had told her and the fact that she’d time travelled to the past, but. The woman clearly knows the rules of this place better than Natasha does.

“Where _are_ we?” Natasha can’t help but ask.

“Look around you,” the woman says.

Natasha looks. And realizes there are cliffs looming around her, still green the way they weren’t in real life, but she saw these from a different perspective, and she knows—

“Vormir,” Natasha says. A statement of fact, not a question.

The woman nods. “Yes. I’ve managed to figure out it’s where we’re lead to whenever the rules of time blur in the world outside the Stone. When the Stone itself is forced into linearity.”

“The beginning.” It’s appropriate, she guesses. A way to contain whatever chaos must be going on in the real world. She looks at the woman, who’s frowning, as if in contemplation.

Wait. Green skin, red hair, stuck inside the Soul Stone. Natasha should have put the facts together earlier. This place is making her slow. “You’re Nebula’s sister, aren’t you? Gamora.”

The woman starts visibly. “I—how did you know that. Unless…” She looks at Natasha, a deep, intense look. “_No_. He won?”

“We went back to try to stop him,” Natasha says. “That’s why I’m here.” She tells Gamora the whole story, the bits and pieces she knows, and by the end of it, Gamora’s fists are balled and she’s worrying at her lip.

“A slim chance,” she says, finally, looking down at her hands. “But it’s a chance. To undo what I did when I led Thanos to Vormir.”

“It wasn’t your fault!” Natasha’s surprised by her own vehemence. But she soldiers on, “It wasn’t your fault. If anything, it was ours. The Avengers. There were so many times—” She has to pause, take a deep breath and close her eyes. Even after five years, the thought of all the mistakes they made makes her want to both hit something and cry. But that kind of speculation isn’t helpful. She’s learned not to dwell. “It’s not your fault. It’s Thanos’.”

“I know,” Gamora says, and her face scrunches up . “But I knew who he was, and still I dared to hope, in some way—” She takes a deep breath. Lets it out. (Natasha sees the air in front of her mouth puff up, then waver and start shaking like the rest of the world. It’s strange.) “Still. I think—”

She never gets to tell Natasha what she thinks, because the world around them _lurches_.

“_What’s going on_?” Natasha is yelling, because suddenly there’s a howling wind whistling in her ears. Or at least the sound of a howling wind, because Natasha can’t actually feel anything. But then again, the way the world is spinning and the land and the sky are both shifting, she doesn’t know how she could feel the wind. “What’s going on?” she asks again. But she already knows, even before Gamora answers.

“This is it. Whatever is going on up there, this is the final fight.”

_Whatever I can do to help._ It’s an incredibly stupid little bit of sentiment, trapped as she is inside the Stone. Still, something has gone wrong if they’re actually fighting, so Natasha focuses on Steve and Tony and Thor and Carol and Rhodey and Rocket and Nebula and everyone else who’s probably (hopefully) up in the real world, fighting for their lives. She focuses, and thinks of victory, thinks of all the things they’ve lost, all the destruction Thanos has wrought, of how he needs to be _ended_—

Something snaps.

The world around them is going crazy, bits of their surroundings flashing into pure whiteness, being overlayed by glimpses of other places that are gone before Natasha can really see them, just…disappearing, the lake the only constant and everything else around it shifting and changing, but she’s not thinking about any of that.

It’s over.

It’s over, and she doesn’t know what happened. She sees the _fearhopedisbelief_ reflected in Gamora’s eyes when she looks across at her, and—

Something else.

There’s something else, darker and deeper, dredging from the depths of the Stone, and she can feel it fighting, fighting, and she grabs Gamora out of instinct. She’s vaguely surprised to feel that Gamora is solid and not the fuzzy, ethereal form the world of the Stone was showing her before, but mostly she’s just holding on for dear life.

“The Stone doesn’t want whatever is happening,” Gamora shouts.

Natasha knows. Natasha can feel it screaming, tearing into her mind, howling and weeping and grappling for some kind of hold it can use to crawl crawl crawl—

A faint light. Or, not a light, but something steady and constant and outside all of this she grabs onto, and suddenly her mind is intertwined with something, someone oh-so-familiar.

_Steve?_

Steve, she thinks wildly, and he’s not here, which means—

_Pull, Steve,_ she pushes at him, as hard as she can. _Pull_.

And she can feel his essence pulling, tugging at her, but it’s not enough. Maybe if she was alone, maybe if Gamora wasn’t there—

Gamora knows, she thinks, because she’s trying to let go of Natasha, but Natasha tightens her grip. No-one else is going to die or get left behind. Not on her watch. She holds onto Gamora, and holds onto Steve, and pulls.

And then she knows exactly what she has to do.

“The lake,” she tells Gamora. She doesn’t have the breath to tell her more (what she’s doing right now might be better termed a mental struggle, but in the realm of the Stone it leaves her gasping and panting for breath), but Gamora understands. She gets her arms around Natasha, and both of them wade into the lake.

Gamora drags Natasha, and Natasha holds onto Steve, and then—

A blinding flash of brilliant white light, and everything goes black.

—

She wakes up slowly. She can feel her body, not like she felt it in the Stone but like it’s a real body in the real world. She opens her eyes, not daring to think anything, but—

“Steve.”

He’s sprawled next to her, blinking himself awake, and he’s alive and here and she’s alive too, and that. Natasha chokes down a sob (she’s not going to cry, she’s _not_) and embraces him. He’s solid and warm and _alive_, and she can feel his heartbeat where she’s got an ear pressed to his chest.

“Natasha,” he’s saying, over and over and over again. “Natasha.” He’s actually crying; she can see tears slipping down his face.

Someone groans, and Natasha remembers, _Gamora_.

She detaches herself from Steve, and gets up, gingerly. She’s in a body, and she’s alive, and it’s the most marvelous thing, and even as she extends her hand to help Gamora stand up, she can feel herself grin.

And then she realizes she can also feel Steve grin, and—

“Do you feel that?” he asks her, and his eyes are wide.

It’s—strange. Natasha realizes belatedly she’s still holding onto Gamora’s hand, and lets go. The strangeness doesn’t change. Just a sense of _Steve_ in the back of her mind. His presence, and she can feel _joysadnessregret_ seeping through into her mind. “Huh.”

“Is something wrong?” Gamora asks, her brows furrowed as she looks from Steve to Natasha.

Natasha could tell her, of course, but— “Steve, this is Gamora. Gamora, Steve Rogers.” She sidesteps the question entirely.

Steve smiles at Gamora, a little awkward and a little strained, and oh. She can feel there’s some sort of story there. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”

Gamora smiles back. She looks bemused, but then, she’s spent much longer in the Stone than Natasha has. And she’s clearly picked up that there’s something Steve isn’t telling her, even without the—bond between Natasha and Steve that made Natasha privy to that particular piece of information.

Natasha leaves Steve and Gamora to their introduction. They’re in Vormir, still, and it’s gloomy and depressing but Natasha thinks that right now it’s the most beautiful place she’s ever seen. She takes a a deep breath, and the air she breathes is real air.

She’s alive.

—

Clint won’t look her in the eye until she challenges him to a sparring match and trounces him thoroughly. Bruce greets her with a great sweeping hug. Sam she gets a bit teary with, because it’s been five years for the two of them, and she's missed his stupid face. Wanda is still sad and remote (so many things she’s lost, and so young), but she melts into Natasha’s embrace all the same. Fury pats her on the shoulder gruffly; the look he gives her says everything. And then, of course, there are Carol and Rhodey and Thor and the others, some of them far away and contactable only by calling, but it’s still them, and they’re there, and it’s the best feeling in the world.

Tony being gone is—

It’s a big gaping wound. Natasha tries not to think about it too much, but not thinking about it too much means not thinking about Tony, so she forces herself not to avoid it completely.

It hurts. She can’t pretend otherwise. Not to herself, and not to Steve, who has a matching yawning pit of grief inside him. What if, what if, what if, they think, and they’re a matching pair in that respect.

Gamora has her own reunions to sort through. They’re far more complicated than any of Natasha’s (she got the whole story from Steve, and Natasha certainly doesn’t envy Gamora), so Natasha leaves her to it. She does give Gamora her phone number programmed into a brand-new phone with universe-wide coverage, though.

“Still,” Natasha says softly, staring up at the stars one evening. She and Steve have spread themselves out on the grass outside the cabin where they’re staying for now. (Natasha had tried to go back to the Avengers compound, but the noise and sound of the city is too much. She’s working on it. Until then, it’s her and Steve out here, being fucked up together.) “The world is getting through, isn’t it. In some ways it’s getting through.”

“Better than we are, I think, sometimes.” Steve props himself up on one hand so he’s in Natasha’s line of sight. “Natasha, I’m so sorry about.” He pauses, searching for words. “About being in your head. I’ll try to find a way—”

She can feel his apologies buzzing in the corner of her mind, and she swats them away. From his wince, she might have been a little too hard, but she’s not going to apologize. The two of them are still learning how to sort out this whole mind-to-mind communication thing. “Steve. It’s fine. Don’t apologize.”

“But—”

“Don’t apologize.” And, because it’s Steve, and because he could figure it out anyway, “It helps me to know what’s real. You, being there in my head. It’s kind of nice.”

It’s strange. Five years ago, maybe even a year ago, she would have hated this. Would have hated the solid presence in her head, hated the knowledge of being tied to another person.

But now she holds onto the link, and hopes that Steve doesn’t mind, because sometimes the world goes blurry—

“I don’t mind,” Steve says, catching the thought, and there’s a smile in his voice.

Natasha smiles back, not at him but up at the stars.

She’s alive. This is real.


End file.
